Jeff Rosenstock has released “Post-“, his new album, as a New Year’s treat. The follow up to 2016’s “Worry”, the album is a ten song affair and there are whole bunch of physicals available to order from his Bandcamp page.

New York’s Jeff Rosenstock has announced a new string of tour dates, this time hitting the West Coast (U.S). The tour will start on February 15th in Phoenix, AZ and will take the band up through to Santa Cruz, where it will end on February 24th. There is also a stretch of East Coast dates that starts on December 13th in Camden, CT and ends in Amityville, NY on December 16th.

Jeff Rosenstock will be joined by acts like Chris Farren and Laura Stevenson for the East Coast portion with Lemuria and ROAR joining in on the West Coast.

You can check out a full list of dates and locations below. If you are interested in winning tickets to the Long Island show on December 16th, click here.

Rosenstock’s latest album Worry was released in 2016 throughSideOneDummy. He also released a split, with Skasucks, last month.

While jamming at an acoustic session for Exclaim, Jeff Rosenstock gave us a new song, “Melba.” No word yet on whether or not this song will appear on a proper release but you can check out the video below.

Rosenstock’s latest album Worry was released in 2016 throughSideOneDummy. He also released a split, with Skasucks, last month.

Jeff Rosenstock just announced a headlining US tour for this summer with former bandmate Laura Stevenson. It will follow Rosenstock through his slot at Chicago’s Pitchfork Festival, with some dates in Canada and Mexico en route.

Jeff Rosenstock has blessed us. Seriously. “Dramamine” is a killer track that I’ve listened to no less than a dozen times by now. It will be in my head for days. Solo projects catch a lot of flack, but Mr. Jeff clearly has the formula down and knows his way around song structure. If this song hooks you, check out last year’s album WORRY, out via SideOneDummy.

If you somehow waited until 2017 to cross “The Menzingers” off your own personal “bands I haven’t seen yet” list, you find yourself in what is, in all likelihood, a bit of a timely, fortunate place. The four-piece Pennsylvania-based punks recently released their fifth — and best — album, After The Party (February 3rd, Epitaph Records) and wrapped up the first of what will undoubtedly be many month-long runs in support of the album. The penultimate date on said tour took place at Boston’s Royale nightclub. Not only was the show at the 1000-capacity venue sold out well it advance, it marked one of roughly a dozen sold-out shows on the jaunt (including a night at the 2500-capacity Fillmore in their home town of Philadelphia). The band have long been critical darlings, and if this particular night was any indication, the band’s increasing — and intensely rabid — fan base will have the quartet’s trajectory continuing to trend exponentially higher and higher.

Upon taking the stage for their headlining spot promptly at 8:30pm (the venue turns into a dance club on Saturday nights, making for an interesting crossover of patrons that perhaps I’ll expound upon some other time but to paint a small picture, just know that there was a guy in a full-sized, furry grey mouse costume waiting to get in as the Menzos show let out), the band ripped into After The Party‘s opening track, “Tellin’ Lies,” and it’s quintessential show-opening guitar riff, dripping with stadium rock swagger. Larger venues like Royale can be a little impersonal and, frankly, awkwardly sterile locales to host punk shows, but that was not the case right from the word “go” on this night. The Menzingers have long had a “home away from home” sort of symbiotic connection with Boston punk community (an idea denoted more than once in the band’s lyrical content over the years), and the band and crowd combined to make a theater feel as intense and intimate as a sweaty basement thanks in part to the seemingly endless barrage of crowd surfers throughout the duration of the 90-ish minute singalong set.

The effectively inimitable Jeff Rosenstock provided direct support on this night, as he did for the duration of the tour. Still touring in support of his stellar full-length album WORRY. (released October 14th on SideOneDummy), Rosenstock has amassed almost as rabid and devout a fanbase as The Menzingers, as his own full-band fourteen song set was also a raucous singalong from start-to-finish, just on a slightly smaller scale. The punk scene is full of enigmatic performers, of course, and the somewhat physically unassuming Rosenstock ranks in the upper echelon of those who seem to genuinely…and generally…REALLY enjoy the hell out of playing and performing in front of an audience night in and night out. Case in point: Rosenstock’s set concluded with an extended version of “You, In Weird Cities” that found the frontman trading his guitar for a saxophone (that had previously been manned by criminally talented touring multi-instrumentalist Dan Potthast), making his way to the back of the venue and assuming a perch atop a table to play along to the song’s singalong outro.

Opening duties were handled by West Virginia’s Rozwell Kid, a high-energy four-piece who, like Rosenstock after them, are a bit difficult to pigeon-hole into a singular genre or subgenre or whatever we’re calling them now, but they’re somewhere in the area of power pop/indie noise with more than a little bit of 70’s rock back-bending, don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously swagger thrown in the mix for good measure. The band have got a full-length, Precious Art, that’s due out June 23rd on SideOneDummy, and is sure to be one of the catchier releases of the summer; put it on your list.

Jeff Rosenstock has announced a slew of upcoming European tour dates. The month-long jaunt kicks off at Groezrock on April 30th and runs through May 27th in Brighton, UK. Check out the full rundown below.

Rosenstock is still touring in support of his latest release, last year’s stellar “WORRY.” which was put out via SideOneDummy.

The Menzingers have announced a headline tour of the United States, following the release of their upcoming album “After the Party” and starting on February 26, 2017. You can find tour dates and locations below.

The Menzingers will be supported by Rozwell Kid for the whole tour, and Jeff Rosenstock for almost all dates. In addition to the tour The Menzingers will also be playing three in-store dates on the east coast during album release week. These dates will be listed below as well. “After the Party” is set to release February 3, 2017 via Epitaph Records. You can pre-order a copy here.

And finally The Menzingers have released a music video for their latest track, “Bad Catholics.” You can find the video below the tour dates.

The question that always comes to mind when I hear a new Jeff Rosenstock record is, “How does he come up with all of these wonderful melodies?” Time and time again, the man delivers the catchy goods like no other can. When Vacation was released, I thought it was a beautiful, beautiful fluke. Then I Look Like Shit came along, then We Cool?, and now we have WORRY.— the next logical step in Jeff Rosenstock’s game of chicken with an apparently infinite creative well.

WORRY. is an album that’ll get accolades. We can get that out of the way early. It’s a damn good record. It succeeds in ambition and scope as a sort of left hook when we were all expecting another album of songs about having trouble growing up (although there’s still a little bit of that). The record sprawls in a way that it almost begs us to talk about the structure over the music. It begins in earnest as a typical album, before shifting gears in the latter half to a musical suite.

The songs, however, are a definite return to form of a form I nearly forgot. So much of Jeff’s solo career has been laser focused on himself, Bomb the Music Industry’s political and anti-corporate philosophy almost feel like the tenets of a different person. That’s not to say they were ever abandoned, but the artist can only be known through their art. On WORRY., Rosenstock spits venom. It’s as if it was decided, early in the writing stage of this record, that punk rock was the definite aim. Songs like “Festival Song,” probably one of the best on the record takes umbrage with punk rock becoming a commoditized entity, through fashion and large-scale festivals. Lines like, “this is not a movement, it’s just careful entertainment for an easy demographic in our sweatshop denim jackets,” are just one of the many piercing lyrics that can make us reevaluate the Venn diagram where punk rock and complacency overlap. And ultimately, I think that’s what Rosenstock is primarily trying to do with a song like this. He’s shaking us by the collar and saying, “If we want punk rock to mean something to us we gotta take it from the people who want it to mean money.”

Just how pointed the lyrics are, across the entirety WORRY., is almost a little daunting. I could pick out caustic couplets from any number of the songs on this album, and that’s why it feels so damn punk. This is an angry album. Rosenstock is pissed about classism, slumlords, and how consumer focused society has become. There’s a lot of stuff going on here, and its never delivered in a less than convincing way. Never lapsing into conspiracy theory and self-congratulations, it instead, comes off as sarcastic and a little sad. And maybe that’s why its all the more effective. On “To Be a Ghost…” Rosenstock sings, “Born as a data mine for targeted marketing and no one will listen up until you become a hashtag or a meme.” When I heard that line, I didn’t care about political cabals and dynasties; the depressing truth is the one we opt in to ourselves, every day.

Where WORRY. falters slightly is in one of the same areas it succeeds magnificently. This is without the doubt the most Bomb the Music Industry! record Rosenstock has made since going solo. Bomb is my favorite band, without a doubt, but they weren’t ever faultless. Sharing the politics and ambition of BTMI! also opens WORRY. to some of the same hangups. What’s strange about this record is that it is both cohesive and woefully not. The first half is made up of traditional songs, the type you wouldn’t be surprised to see on any other Jeff album, and then the albums switches up at about the halfway point and offers this amazing suite of short songs (featuring ska, hardcore, and the shout along refrain, “we don’t wanna live inside a hellhole!”). It’s a great album, but at times it feels like two.

I wasn’t sure where WORRY. was going to end up in my personal ranking of Jeff Rosenstock related albums. Maybe, I’m still not sure. The fact remains, that this is a big album of big ideas delivered as viciously as they are catchily. What small faults I can find with the album are the result of the best of intentions. This is an album of chaotic creativity and unbridled talent, less about what punk rock is than what it could be at its best.

Band Spotlight

Hailing from Lincoln, UK Nieviem is a newer skate punk band that has been tearing it up for a little over a year. Steadily releasing new songs, live recordings, and EPs, the band continues the trend with their second EP The Hope Is There. The EP is fast and heavy, borrowing from hardcore but still strongly entrenched in 90's skate punk. If that sounds up your alley, then give it a listen here.